Song of the Week: “A Day in the Life” by The Beatles

 

People who have a problem with The Beatles have a problem. The first fab four may not be the Wright Brothers of modern pop music, but they are the Henry Ford. They performed music that would influence all music henceforth. Not only did the band evolve in the tradition sense of a band’s evolution (get better at playing music, get better at writing songs, get better at recording and producing an album, get better at being famous, get better at doing drugs etc.) The Beatles evolved in the biological sense. Just as complex, multicellular, warm-blooded and closed circulatory systemed mammals were once tiny amoebae, The Beatles, who became a psychedelic rock band, who were some of the first Westerners to diddle around in India, who became peace and love hippies, once played (almost) run-of-the-mill, pop music for the radio.

Most importantly, and most interestingly, is that, at the same time, they made a uniquely accessible music that almost everyone likes or (at the very least) everyone at the time liked. When Mumford & Sons recently had 6 songs chart in the Billboard Hot 100, they accomplished something no other band had achieved since The Beatles did the same in September of 1964. Of course The Beatles dominance wasn’t really challenged. While none of the Mumford & Sons songs cracked the top 50, four out of The Beatles’ six were in the top half of the list. Not to mention that the group had fourteen songs in the Hot 100 earlier that year in April. They were inventive and wildly ahead of their time even while being fully embraced by contemporaries.

Thank god someone thought to record them, otherwise I would have really missed out.

My favorite part about this song (besides its entirety) may be imagining a crowd of people staring through a car window, wondering if those spattered brains once belonged to a member of the House of Lords. Celebrity culture has reached new heights, but it’s refreshing for a cynical 20 year old to see that the human fascination with fame (specifically fame for fame’s sake) is at least half of a century old. My generation isn’t the first, and won’t be the last, to wonder aloud whether that guy was famous once and either dismissing or diving headfirst into the story depending on the answer.